Siemens Connects with Customers in Southeast Asia at SPACe 2015

Summary
Launched in 2011 to help increase engagement between Siemens and users of its process automation technology in the Southeast Asia region, the third edition of the Siemens Process Automation Conference and Exhibition (SPACe) took place August 18-21 in Bali, Indonesia, with some 175 delegates in attendance.

As with the previous events, in Malaysia in 2011, and in Thailand in 2013, SPACe 2015 provided a lively forum for its three main constituencies: Siemens executives and technical experts, channel partners, and end users. Participants had the opportunity to discuss trends in the process industries, take a deep dive into technology solutions, and hear users from all the six major Southeast Asia countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam talk about their automation implementation experiences. Notably, these users represented a range of industry verticals.

Compared to the previous events, SPACe 2015 in Indonesia shifted the focus somewhat away from PCS 7, Siemens' flagship DCS offering, to digitalization. The company sees this as a game changer in optimizing the entire lifecycle by enabling seamless and sophisticated connection between plant engineering, commissioning, and operation.

Siemens in Southeast Asia

In his opening message, Dr. Friedhelm Geiger, Head, Process Automation and Engineering, ASEAN, stressed the importance of the process industries to a supplier like Siemens. Since the region accounts for a dominant share of the worldwide addressable market for the technology supplied by the Siemens Process Industries and Drives division, Asia and the Southeast Asia sub-region have heightened importance.

Siemens supplements its own sales, marketing, and technical support resources in all key Southeast Asian countries with an extensive and highly evolved channel partner ecosystem. The company believe that this is a differentiator in the region, particularly in the DCS market. Many of those partners were in evidence at SPACe 2015, including Excel Marco, MESCADA, Rovisys, Simentari, and ZI-ARGUS.

While partners can handle projects all the way to execution, Siemens has a dedicated Engineering Hub, in Bangkok, Thailand (one of three in Asia), to coordinate and execute projects on its own behalf in Southeast Asia. Recent PCS 7 projects carried out by the regional hub include a glucose plant for Cargill in Indonesia; a palm oil refinery for Unilever, also in Indonesia; and a formulation plant for Bayer in Thailand.

Siemens offers a comprehensive technology offering for it process industry customers. This encompasses the field, control, and engineering/management levels with products such as process instrumentation, motors, networks, distributed control systems, programmable logic controllers, drive systems, plant engineering systems, and manufacturing execution systems.

Many of these technologies were available for closer inspection and discussion at the exhibition area and also the subject of dedicated break-out sessions.

In addition, the company's domain expertise and ability to provide industry-specific solutions allows Siemens to cater to the specific needs of sectors such as cement, chemicals, food & beverage, oil & gas, and pharmaceuticals.

Aside from the user presentations, which highlighted some of the challenges and implemented solutions in these and other verticals, SPACe 2015 included three dedicated industry sessions: Technological Solutions for Mining, Cement and Minerals in Southeast Asia; Trends and Solutions for the Sugar Industry in Southeast Asia; and Technological Solutions for the Chemical Industry in Southeast Asia.

It's All about Digitalization

The previous SPACe events in Southeast Asia revolved largely around the PCS 7 process automation system, with considerable keynote time given to recounting its evolution, describing new features in the latest version, and providing a taste of future releases.

While PCS 7 remains the most significant part of Siemens process industry offering, Dr. Geiger and fellow keynote speaker Mareike Blettner, Head of Marketing, Automation & Engineering, from Siemens HQ in Germany, clearly wanted to get across a much broader message; that of digitalization.

So what is digitalization and why is it so important? As Ms. Blettner explained, the digital revolution has impacted our everyday lives, from the way we consume music, read books, search for information, and much more. And in the industrial world, digitalization technologies represent an opportunity to optimize businesses in the process industries along the entire plant lifecycle.

The fundamental aspect of Siemens' approach to digitalization involves delivering seamless connection between the main stages of the plant lifecycle: engineering, commissioning, and operations.

COMOS, Siemens' plant design and engineering software tool, is a key enabler of digitalization. Complete plant information is stored in its central, object-oriented database such that all relevant departments involved in the engineering/commissioning/operating phases always access the same data for a given object, and any changes are available to users worldwide and up-to-date and consistent.

An interface between COMOS and the PCS 7 DCS enables an "integrated engineering" approach, with transfer of appropriate engineering data from COMOS into PCS 7. This avoids the need to start from scratch, saving considerable resource time and cost. Furthermore, since this interface is bidirectional, changes in PCS 7 during commissioning or operation are automatically fed back to COMOS to ensure consistency between engineering and automation data.

And by connecting the PCS 7 DCS with Siemens' SIMIT simulation tool, users could also benefit from "virtual commissioning," since this would allow them to test the complete automation function and process behavior before involving the actual plant equipment. With bidirectional communication, the simulation data could connect back into PCS 7 to tune the automation function. According to Dr. Geiger, virtual commissioning is "a big, big thing that will come in the next couple of years and is where the money lies in the future."

With integrated engineering, operations, and virtual commissioning, and integrated operations enabled by digitalization, Siemens customers have major opportunities to realize cost and time savings, reduce downtime and risk of plant upsets and accidents, and improve equipment utilization and production quality.

Sharing Experiences

One of the big draws of an automation user conference is the opportunity for users to hear from other users: What did they seek to automate? Why did they select a specific technology? What benefits did they realize? Could I use a similar approach in my facility?

Of course, in the case of SPACe 2015, it was about the experiences with process automation technology from Siemens. While PCS 7 applications dominated the twelve case studies presented, the recent reorganization that created the Process Industries and Drives division allowed Siemens' drive solutions for the process sector to get some exposure. A summary of selected user presentations follows.

Fertilizer Plant (Vietnam)

At PetroVietnam's The Phu My fertilizer plant, the company needed to upgrade its Siemens PCS 7 v5.2 system that had been controlling the facility's electrical infrastructure for 13 years. Difficulties in sourcing spare parts and the need to integrate new process units triggered the decision to upgrade to PCS 7 v8.1. The system now includes the latest CPU 410-5H for the controller and IPC547E industrial PCs for the engineering and operator workstations. The upgrade project proceeded smoothly and was completed ahead of schedule.

LPG Terminal (Indonesia)

At Pertamina's LPG terminal (14 tanks, 19,000 metric tons) at the Tanjung Priok port, the company implemented a PCS 7 integrated control and safety system. The system includes two sets of redundant controllers for process and safety control plus integration to the SAP system to enhance business visibility.

Specialty Chemical Plant (Singapore)

The recently expanded Evonik Oil Additives facility in Singapore is now the largest of the company's five additive plants globally. A new alarm management solution based on the ISA 18.2 standard implemented in the plant's new PCS 7 control system reduces inappropriate alarms caused by changing operating conditions. This has led to improvements in both uptime and safety performance.

Sugar Mill (Thailand)

The Kaset Thai International Sugar facility in Thailand is the world's largest sugar mill. The company transformed it traditional steam turbine configuration using Siemens Integrated Drive Systems (IDS) technology. This resulted in a 30 percent increase in efficiency and a much smaller equipment footprint. The scope of supply includes a 1,000 kW Heavy Duty Pressure Feeder Drive comprising SINAMICS G180 medium voltage air-cooled drive, SIMOTICS 1PQ4 motors, and FLENDER PLANUREX gear units.

Conclusion

While established and evolved in other parts of the world, notably North America and Europe, automation user conferences are more the exception than the rule in Southeast Asia. The events that do take place are either entire Asia-Pacific in terms of customer inclusion or otherwise take place at the individual country level. To the best of our knowledge, Siemens is currently the only major automation vendor that holds a dedicated user conference in Southeast Asia.

Given that users in this region are often reluctant to open up and agree to discuss project experiences, Siemens can be commended for gathering such a large contingent of user speakers at SPACe 2015 and attracting attendees form across the process industries and from all major countries in Southeast Asia.

This high level of involvement is aided by the User Advisory Board (UAB), an organization comprised mainly of Siemens' customers and channel partners. Siemens set up the UAB in Southeast Asia in conjunction with SPACe to strengthen its relationship with its process industry customer base and encourage the formation of a community of Siemens process automation technology users.

SPACe currently takes place every two years in Southeast Asia. This sparks an intense burst of energy when Siemens customers, partners, and staff gather in the selected city for the conference followed by an inevitable drop-off in connectedness

ARC recommends that users of automation technology take advantage of these types of regional conferences to catch up on the latest supplier offerings and share real-world experiences.

We recommend that automation suppliers sustain the momentum that comes with a successful user conference with regular and value-added communication to users highlighting new technologies or successful implementations. An internet-based forum for users to interact with the suppliers' experts and with each other on technical issue could also be useful.

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Keywords: Siemens, SPACe, Southeast Asia, Digitalization, PCS 7, ARC Advisory Group.